ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes how Up-country Tamils’ profound displacement and the structural inequities of the plantation system limited their attempts to make a home for themselves as a diaspora next door to their ancestral homeland. It deals with new concept of a “diaspora next door” within the context of other academic studies of diasporic communities. The chapter examines the effects that the different modes of migration had on processes of cultural identification within the South Asian diaspora, such as caste, class and ethnicity. It also examines the structural violence built into this contract system of labor recruitment and management. The chapter discusses the daily life on tea plantations in Sri Lanka and concludes with an analysis of how Up-country Tamils have begun a process of emplacement in Sri Lanka using ethnicity, rather than caste or class, as the basis for communal solidarity. In the colonial period, the vast majority of migrants from India became daily-wage earning plantation laborers.
